Then Drew dropped to his knees in the parking lot and clutched Adrien’s arm like he was praying. His father worked double shifts at a warehouse and the family still struggled with rent, his mother cleaned houses until her back gave out, and he was supposed to be the one who got them out. Adrien pulled free and said Christa didn’t get to leave town either, because she was in the ground.
Drew kept sobbing and offering to sell his car when the gym door swung open and his coach stepped out. Drew scrambled to his feet, wiping his face, looking at Adrien with desperate hope that mercy was still on offer. “Actually, coach,” Adrien said, “there’s something you need to see.” Three weeks later Drew lost his scholarship, and every early practice and weekend tournament that was supposed to rescue his family went with it.
The Wait That Ended at an Engagement Party
Drew tried to warn the others the day after he got the news, and Spencer and Philip laughed in his face and called him paranoid. They had reason to feel safe. When a girl accused Spencer of grabbing her at a party, his mother had lunch with the principal and the girl transferred districts, and when rumors about Christa surfaced, his father donated to the athletic department and the rumors vanished.
Spencer couldn’t be taken down the way Drew was, not while adults stood ready to bury anything unflattering. So Adrien graduated, moved away, took a job, and waited for Spencer to build a life of his own, something his parents couldn’t simply erase. Two years after graduation, scrolling social media at three in the morning, Adrien found an engagement announcement: Spencer with his arm around a blonde woman named Eloise, an enormous ring on her finger, the comments full of “couple goals.”
Three weeks later, Adrien had moved to Spencer’s city, taken a job at a coffee shop six blocks from his house, and started learning his routine. That’s how Eloise turned out to be only one of the women in his life. One slipped out of his apartment at seven in the morning while Eloise was at work, and two days later it was someone else. By the end of the first month, Adrien had counted eighteen, along with photos, videos, dating-app screenshots, and written statements from three women who never knew he was engaged.
Six weeks in, Spencer spotted the car parked outside his office and stormed over, threatening to have Adrien arrested for stalking. “My name is Adrien,” came the answer. “I was Christa’s best friend.” Spencer laughed it off, boasting that his family had more lawyers than Adrien had brain cells and that people like him always win. Then the phone came out, and as the photos and videos scrolled by, his confidence cracked; he insisted one visitor was a cousin, and Adrien asked if the other eighteen were cousins too.
Spencer grabbed Adrien’s shirt through the window and snarled that nothing on that phone could touch him. Adrien peeled his fingers away and said there was no need to prove what he’d done to Christa when proving he was a cheater would do. Then Adrien rolled up the window and drove off, already planning for the engagement party that Saturday.
On the night of the party, Adrien parked across from the venue and watched everyone who mattered to the couple arrive. Thirty minutes after the start time, Adrien sent Eloise everything. Through the windows, Adrien watched her smile fade as she scrolled, saw her hand fly to her mouth, and then saw her find Spencer across the room, laughing without a care. The sound she made cut through the music, and the whole room turned to look at her.
Eloise marched over and shoved the phone in Spencer’s face. He tried to steer her into a corner, then called the photos fake and the whole thing a setup, so she read one of the written statements aloud: four months with a man who claimed to be single. The room went silent. She said she’d spent those four months picking flowers and tasting cakes, ignoring red flags and defending him to everyone who warned her, and then she pulled off her ring and threw it at his chest.
As she left, Spencer’s father pulled his son back and hissed that he had wrecked the family’s reputation in front of two hundred people. He told Spencer not to come home and not to call, then declared he no longer had a son. His mother wouldn’t look at him, his friends backed away, and Adrien watched him stand alone in the middle of the room with nobody coming to save him. It felt good, though not as good as Adrien had expected, only good enough to keep going.
Five Years of Closed Doors
That night, Adrien sat in the dark and scrolled to the last photo of Christa, taken at a coffee shop two weeks before she died, laughing and looking brighter than she had in months. Two of the three were wrecked, and she was still gone. Philip, the one who started it, was still out there living well. Over the next five years Adrien became obsessed with him, tracking every update as he finished law school with honors, landed a spot at a top firm, shook hands with judges at charity events, and wore suits that cost more than Adrien’s rent.